“there is in the most occidental part of Iberia, a very strange society, they don´t rule themselves, nor do they allow others to rule them.”
Source: "Bellum Britannicum", De bello Gallico, IV. 20-30, V. 8-23; 1881 [Leather Bound]
“Society has reached such extreme heights of absurdity, and massive depths of depravity, that I can no longer accurately distinguish between truth and satire. That line is as blurry as Bigfoot.”
Source: A Memoir of Memories and Memes
“Human beings' capacity to adjust to almost anything was supposed to be one of their greatest virtues, but it was also one of their greatest weaknesses. It rendered them compliant, allowed them to be exploited.”
Source: The Store
“There is no them and us, it is just us.”
Source: The Dark Side of the Mind: True Stories from My Life as a Forensic Psychologist
“And therefore the responsibility of raising the challenge is typically in the hands of those who recognize that they have a subordinate status. It's very hard to recognize that. I mean, people lived, you know, for millennia without recognizing that they are being subordinated in systems of power.
I mean, it's true of women, for example, or slaves, you know. I mean, most slave societies were accepted by the slaves as legitimate and, in fact, necessary. And the same is true of, for example, people have jobs today in our society, almost without exception, they consider it legitimate for them to be in a position where they have to rent themselves in order to survive.
That's certainly not obvious, you know. And in fact, if you go back a century ago, it was not only considered not obvious but it was considered outlandish by American working people. I'm not talking about Marxists or socialists, or anybody like that, but say, millhands in Lowell, Massachusetts, who never heard of socialism, who regarded it as a form of slavery, and were complaining that they had not fought the Civil War to replace chattel slavery by wage labor and that therefore, those who work in the mills ought to own them because that's the republican rights that we won in the American Revolution, and so on and so forth.
So, you know, it's not obvious, but by now, I think, enough indoctrination and propaganda have taken place so people do regard that form of subordination to external authority as legitimate. Whether they should is another question, but the fact is they do, just as for most of history, women have accepted a subordinate role as correct and proper and so on. And slaves did, and people living in, say, feudal societies.
In a feudal society, people had a place, you know, some kind of rule, and quite typically the societies were stable because people regarded those structures as legitimate. The same is true of religious structures, and I mean, throughout human life, there's a whole variety of systems of authority, and oppression, and domination, and so on, which are usually accepted as legitimate by the people subordinated to them. When they don't, you have struggles and revolutions, and sometimes changes, and sometimes brutality, and so on.”
“Dominance hierarchy is probably as old as mammal societies. Among behaviorally complex mammals, certainly among chimpanzees, patterns recognizably like ethics and politics have appeared, how long ago we don't know, but probably millions of years ago. And mammalian play, the seedbed of later capacities, goes back probably at least as far.”
Source: Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
“We did not come from nowhere. We are embedded in a very deep biological and cosmological history. That history does not determine us, because organisms from the very beginning, and increasingly with each new capacity, have influenced their own fate.”
Source: Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
“The aspect of "civilization" that is most hostile to festivity is not capitalism or industrialism - both of which are fairly recent innovations - but social hierarchy, which is far more ancient. When one class, or ethnic group or gender, rules over a population of subordinates, it comes to fear the empowering rituals of the subordinates as a threat to civil order.”
Source: Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
“When I was a little girl,' I said, sitting down, 'the wallpaper in my room had pictures of Noah's story.' [...]
You know what's weird though? It's weird that the ark would be such a kids' story, you know? I mean, it's...really a story about death. Every person who isn't in Noah's family? They die. Every animal, apart from two of each on the boat? They die. They all die in the flood. Billions of creatures. It's the worst tragedy ever,' I finished, my voice tied off by a knot in my chest.[...] 'What the hell,'I said, 'pardon my language, was that doing on my wallpaper?”
Source: The True Meaning of Smekday
“World is made in your image.”
Source: Yüz Şiirlerin Yüzüğü (Ring of 100 Poems, Bilingual Edition): 100 Turkish Poems with Translations